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A New Look at Habits and the Habit–Goal Interface
Wendy Wood and David T. Neal
Duke University
The present model outlines the mechanisms underlying habitual control of responding and the ways in
which habits interface with goals. Habits emerge from the gradual learning of associations between
responses and the features of performance contexts that have historically covaried with them (e.g.,
physical settings, preceding actions). Once a habit is formed, perception of contexts triggers the
associated response without a mediating goal. Nonetheless, habits interface with goals. Constraining this
interface, habit associations accrue slowly and do not shift appreciably with current goal states or
infrequent counterhabitual responses. Given these constraints, goals can (a) direct habits by motivating
repetition that leads to habit formation and by promoting exposure to cues that trigger habits, (b) be
inferred from habits, and (c) interact with habits in ways that preserve the learned habit associations.
Finally, the authors outline the implications of the model for habit change, especially for the self-
regulation of habit cuing.
Keywords: habit, goal, automaticity, behavior change, self-regulation
Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.
Sometimes we do something new (Townsend & Bever, 2001, p. 2).
From the humdrum to the consequential, daily actions tend to be
patterned into sequences that are repeated at particular times in
customary places. If Townsend and Bever (2001) are correct, the
majority of day-to-day living is characterized by repetition in this
way.
Empirical estimates of repetition in daily life come from signal-
contingent experience-sampling diary investigations. Participants
in these studies recorded once per hour for several days what they
were doing, thinking, and feeling (Quinn & Wood, 2005; Wood,
Quinn, & Kashy, 2002). In college student as well as community
samples, about 45% of the behaviors participants listed in their
diaries tended to be repeated in the same physical location almost
every day. Substantial amounts of repetition in stable contexts also
have been documented with other naturalistic paradigms. In Barker
and Schoggen’s (1978) ecological analysis, observers from the
Midwest Psychological Field Station obtained finely detailed re-
cordings of children’s everyday activities in a small town. The
researchers found a high degree of repetition in daily activities, and
consistent with the diary studies, this repetition was linked to
specific environments. Accordingly, Barker (1968) proposed that
the most proximal predictor of responding is the behavior setting,
defined as “standing patterns of behavior-and-milieu” (p. 19).
Why do people repeat actions in contexts in this way? In the
heyday of behaviorism, psychologists invoked associative learning
mechanisms and stimulus–response (S-R) habits to explain re-
peated responding cued by recurring stimuli. More recently, social
and personality psychologists have attributed consistency in re-
sponding to people’s goals, intentions, and other dispositions (e.g.,
attitudes, personality) that lead them to value, and hence to pursue
repeatedly, particular outcomes in particular contexts. In this arti-
cle, we outline a synthetic theory that integrates habit responding
with recognition of the essentially goal-directed nature of much
human action. As we show below, habits are neither the simple
S-R links advanced by some behaviorists nor the automatic ex-
pression of people’s goals. In our model, habits are subserved by
a form of automaticity that involves the direct association between
a context and a response but that interfaces with goals during
learning and performance.
New Model of Habits in Brief
Habits are learned dispositions to repeat past responses. They
are triggered by features of the context that have covaried fre-
quently with past performance, including performance locations,
preceding actions in a sequence, and particular people. Contexts
activate habitual responses directly, without the mediation of goal
states. We decompose this definition into three principles that play
out in the acquisition of habits and in their performance once
acquired.
The first principle in our model centers on the power of contexts
to trigger habitual responding. That is, the automaticity underlying
habits builds on patterns of covariation between features of per-
formance contexts and responses—patterns that arise intentionally
or unintentionally in the course of daily life. People form habits as
they encode these context–response patterns in procedural mem-
ory. Once formed, the habitual response comes to be primed or
Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, Department of Psychology and
Neuroscience, Duke University.
We thank Jeffrey Quinn for his important contribution to early stages of
this work. In addition, the manuscript was improved from the thoughtful
commentary of Henk Aarts, Dolores Albarracı´n, John Bargh, Marilynn
Brewer, Tanya Chartrand, Joel B. Cohen, Mark Conner, Anthony Dickin-
son, Alice H. Eagly, Scott Huettel, Bas Verplanken, and the students in the
Duke Interdisciplinary Initiative in Social Psychology. This work was
supported by the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wendy
Wood, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University,
Box 90085, Durham, NC 27708. E-mail: wendy.wood@duke.edu
Psychological Review Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association
2007, Vol. 114, No. 4, 843–863 0033-295X/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
843
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